The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
P. J. O'ROURKERich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
-
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
P. J. O'ROURKE -
You can’t destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America’s elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you’re doing us a favor.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let’s hope so.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a promissory note that doesn’t actually promise anything. It’s not backed by gold or silver.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
P. J. O'ROURKE